Mere bragging about my home Linux system isn't enough, here. I still like variety, still maintain multiple computers and always will want a different distro on each one, if for no other reason than to stay broad and test my own productions on multiple platforms. But the choices other than Slackware have gone from moderate to desperately dismal lately, to the point that I would like to point out some *lessons* that many other distros could learn from Slackware:
(1) "Open Source" means "you can access the source code". Source code is nearly useless if all you can do is read it - you have to be able to compile it/interpret it. Do not strip out every single possible file having anything at all to do with source code. Slackware keeps the compilers and interpreters and libraries and header files and documentation needed for programming in about 15-20 different languages. You'd think that is a given - "Open Source" - "programming tools" - DUH! - but in fact, it's an exception. Damn near a freak.
(2) "Following the herd" is for lemmings. Slackware has kept it's text mode installer while the whole world has gone GUI-crazy. Listen, GUIs are a great idea when you're watching a movie or editing graphics or surfing the web - get it? That's what you need a GUI for. When all you need is to read and write text, a GUI is a useless, superfluous, wasteful, unnecessary overhead.
(3) "Popular" is for homecoming Queens. Slackware has gone halfway to divinity by ditching Gnome. Now I'd love it if it took the other step and ditched KDE, too. Check out the two-disk distro - know why you need two disks instead of one? KDE. The other window managers are any one better than Gnome and KDE combined, but if nobody ever tries them, no one else will ever know.
(4) Distributions are released on disks for a reason - to put the operating system ON THE DISKS! Not putting in a patch-work kernel that's just enough for it to wheeze it's way online and download the other 99.99% of itself. I don't know which I get more annoyed with with other distros - wasting the money to burn all those disks, or discovering I am expected to pay for another internet connection just because the system is helpless without the umbilical cord of the internet connected to it. You can take a computer, an electric generator, and your two Slackware disks to a desert island and end up with a complete system ready-to-go - and able to reproduce copies of itself if need be, thanks to those handy programming tools. I just can't figure out how Slackware does so much more on two disks than other distros do in five.
(5) Read docs - documentation good. Slackware has the full compliment of man pages, info system files, docbook, and various contents of/usr/share/doc, and in addition includes HOWTOs and FAQs from the Linux documentation project.
(6) Keep it simpler than simple. I've practically thrown up when I explore the directories of soem distros. Pointers to pointers to pointers to nothing, programs missing half the files they need to run, everything scattered to hell and gone. Then people wonder why their system can't detect it's hardware and freezes up. Slackware follows the traditional directory structure and abides by it, going by the rule that conventions form over time because they make sense, and are not to be disregarded in the pursuit of arrogantly asserting how bold and creative you are.
(7) There is no Slackware For Dummies. And well there should not be, because this distro is one that actually *compliments* your intelligence. And you'd be amazed how smart you are, when you're given the chance to be! So the package manager is minimal, and I hope it never changes. Packages are un-needed anyway, when the system can handle any source-code tarball you throw at it.
Thank you all for glancing through it. We now return you to your regular grandstanding about Photoshop, Ubuntu, and Star trek.
I'm looking to upgrade the "family PC" (it's Red Hat install is creaking with age) and was thinking of Suse. I read through all three pages of the review and didn't find the answer to two of my biggest concerns:
Other desktops? I like Fluxbox and Window Maker and despise KDE and am even impatient with Gnome.
And numero-uno: Can I actually INSTALL something on it? Starting with JUST a TARBALL? Good compiler support, *complete* library/header files/developer packages, basic development/scripting tools (Perl, Python, Tcl/Tk, libc)? Is "compile", formerly a given in the Linux world, considered a bad word in a Suse forum? I hate being limited to what packages are available just for the distro or worse yet, being stuck with a whole system structured around a package manager that puts me through dependency-hell half the time (and treats me like a dunce the rest of the time). Which is why I run Slackware on my "home box". Also why I rarely touch Mandriva on the "kid's box". And why I've even tinkled around with Linux-From-Scratch. Hacker-friendly won't matter as much on the family machine, but when the Missus wants her Yahoo-chat-avatar-designer plugin that is available only as source code, I want to be able to get in, slap it in, and get out, not sit there for two days downloading an entire programming infrastructure for each little thing. It would be nice if my own custom programming solutions (simple Tkwish, Python apps, C++ SDL proggies, etc.) ran here, too.
And by the way, do you pronounce Suse like Dr. Seuss or like Suzy Creamcheese?
I'm rolling with laughter over here...because for 75% of the Slashdotters hissing and booing at the rant, you're just looking in a mirror! This is exactly the same degree of fussing I see in here all the time, with the exception that the Slashdotters usually *mean* "dumbed down for granny" when they say "easy to use".
And of course, EVERYBODY wants infinite power while expending minimum effort. Yeah, I'd like not just graphic-editing software, but everything-editing software that can do everything I would ever hope to do and be just as intuitive as walking to use and require no learning at all. I'd also like a billion dollars, a Playboy-model threesome in my bed every night, and a lamp-bound genie to grant me infinite wishes whenever I summon him. For free. All I have to do is hold out my hand and it will fall out of the sky to me, right? Hey, c'mon! What are you laughing at? What's so unreasonable about my request?
I'm going to keep repeating it until it sinks into the consciousness out there: "Stealth Bombers are more difficult to operate than tricycles BECAUSE THEY CAN FLY."
I say again, Blogger sucks. I am repeatedly incredulous that Google is tied to this company. Blogger is doing - and will do - *nothing* about *anything*. Picture a dark office with empty cubicles and nobody there and phones lighting up and ringing and going unanswered. That's Blogger.com. Try emailing *anything* to *any* Blogger email address such as tech support - you get the same canned autoresponse pointing you at their scanty help pages - and nothing else. The server goes down for days at a time before somebody even notices. Note the "news" section on the Blogger.com page: last updated August 17th. Watch and see how long before this article's issue is even addressed - if ever!
Yet I stick with it, simply because I get traffic there that I don't get anywhere else. I go to *any* other blog site, which is actually staffed and the *code* *works* (Bloggerese bears no resemblance to HTML or any other known language, and is distinguishable in that it NEVER works the same way on two consecutive days.) and the site's always up. And I sit with my beautiful blog listening to the crickets chirp! I put it on Blogger and get 200 hits per day right at the start. The most popular piece of abandonware on the internet.
An awful thought - what if the traffic is ALL BOTS????
Good choice! Our family doesn't do fast food - period - but this was school we're talking about. So I caved. Have you noticed how much kids are targeted by advertising while in school? My kids bring home marketing junk from places like Home Depot and FedEx (T-shirts and such) that visit class. FedEx actually sent the daughter home with a temporary tattoo. I drew the line there - big business wants to graffitti their logo on my kid's bodies? I pitched it.
Heeeeyack! It's a CAPITALIST society! The only way you keep one going is to keep people buying more and more stuff!
Who among us could not grok the same frustration? Funny anecdote: My kid went on a school field trip which included a stop at McDonald's. She returned with her happy-meal toy: a tiny little stuffed puppy-doll with a hu-u-ge tag sewn to it, just screaming with advertising and copyright information. The tag was about three times as big as the dog. I sent her for the scissors and snipped the tag off (in blatant disregard for the fine print saying I was committing a crime). Then the light bulb went off, and I asked her for all the *rest* of her stuffed animals. We had great fun performing tag-ectomies, as I explained to her that we had bought and paid for everything in the house, so it was ours to do with as we pleased, including stripping the commercial propaganda out of it. I think dolls are more fun to play with when they're allowed to just be dolls. She agreed. I'm just doing my best to raise a lawless little punk, here! (:
It's stuff like that that frustration with corporate capitalism can drive you to.
Geez, a couple months ago I dared to suggest (1) that Tim-Berners-Lee was not - in fact - God almighty, and (2) the whole web thing is just one way to do the internet...it's the standard we ended up adopting mainly because, like so much else in the technology field, it was in the right place at the right time. Dozens of other multiple implementations could have formed. For pointing out all of the above, I got flamed from (I lost count) about 20 different directions. Now another guy, who, like me, was hanging around in computer rooms before most of you were out of diapers voices a hankerin' to make a new internet...something (yeah, he WAS kinda hazy on that point). He gets dismissed as a crotchety old man. And neither one of us are even all that old.
Guess everybody is too busy kissing the status-quo's ass to consider that things might change? What, something that's only been around for 30 years is all of a sudden hewwed in stone? Well, surprise, the technology you're married to now WILL crumble to dust eventually, as will your own dear bones, be it in a decade, a century, or a millenium. And other things WILL replace it. Be it by a new twist on an old scheme dreamed up out of some codger's half-gone imagination, or the fresh, new idea of young blood. Momento mori....
You folks talking about Linux as if it were another corporation with a CEO and a board of directors...we must not forget a very important factor: Linux is you. Linux is me. Linux is every programmer who has lived and every programmer who is yet to be born. The licensing makes it belong to everybody at the same time. True, corporations like Red Hat, you are not them. But Red Hat is only a teeny part of Linux, what some people came along and decided to do with Linux just like any of the rest of us could do.
Now, then: What is "our" best strategy? Do we want to see our software continue to improve and be freely available to everyone else as it was to us? Or do we want to give up, all of us give control of the world's computers to a few guys in suits to own forever, while we pay them for the priviledge of being enslaved? OK, not to prolong the straw-man's agony another minute - the public has already shown that it prefers to own and control it's own software, given the choice. It doesn't matter that the choice isn't unanimous - somebody else's decision to keep software free for all gives *you* the right to own and control a piece of it - whether you choose to depart from paid corporateware or not. If you don't pick Linux this year, it will be here next year to pick again. It can't go bankrupt because it doesn't live on money, so refusing to buy it cannot kill it.
That's the problem that MS is having. They're armed to fight lions and tigers and - dragons (oh no!) unaware that a bacteria is coursing through their veins, defeating them from the inside out. The truth is, Linux belongs to Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, too. So it belongs to everyone who works under them. It even belongs to real dickheads. But nobody can take it away from anybody else. How do you defeat air? or a cloud? or a dream? Linux is just that immaterial.
So it's silly to say what's in Linux's best interest. Linux doesn't have one. It is just an element. A corporation, on the other hand, is either making money and "alive" or not making any money and "dead". Since, unlike Linux, it *can* be killed, *it* has to worry what a best strategy is. In *their* best interest - is it better to spend the last fibre of your being trying to defeat something that can never go away? Or better to adjust to this new element and live peacefully with it - perhaps even support it?
I have a better idea. How about we shut all the Adobe-Macromedia zealots out of the whole conversation? The whole world does not revolve around Adobe-Macromedia and you A-M zealots absolutely never miss an opportunity to try to turn everything into a Gimp-vs-Adobe flamewar, even things that have nothing to do with it at all. I'm starting to think that Adobe is just as bad as Microsoft.
Any of the Penn & Teller books, "How to play with your food", "How to play in traffic", "Cruel tricks for dear friends". I highly recommend the lighting pickle, the bloody heart-cake, the card trick w/ pizza delivery punchline, etc. You'll have more twisted ideas than you can implement in a single week. Try not to get arrested.
without losing a sense of reason Note that I nowhere cited reason. Only reflex, born of instinct. Reason is there to supply further judgement. Instinct is there to get my feet running in the mathematically most likely direction away-from-danger/towards-safety.
It's just that: every concern for sexual politics you can name happens to ordinary people right here on the ground all the time. People screw, unscrew, regroup, remove, and repent. See, you could send swinging couples up, so everybody can be comfortable with everybody else. Or make all the crew-members gay as some have suggested (though I don't know why; gays can break up and cheat and fight with the best of 'em). Or bring on people who don't have a high sex drive (even the most promiscuous of us can go 30 months without sex...such as after being widowed or divorced).
See, I've been places and seen things, and was for a while a frequenter of...if I described it, people would say "swinger's clubs", and that's not it at all, but we'll call them "swinger's clubs". You *learn* things about people, there. You learn to *relax* about sex! It happens. It happens to some people more than others, of course, and it happens in forms that attract and repell different kinds of people, given. You discover that you can be part of the orgy, or a spectator, and after a few turns at both, it doesn't make as much of a difference. Believe it or not, a group of people in a space capsule for 30 months are pretty much going to do what comes naturally, and you'd just better be ready to deal with it. Fix them, pack condoms, whatever it takes. It's also not the Soap Opera that people are trying to make it out to be: couples with rotten relationships stay together for years for the sake of the kids; I'm sure a couple can stick it out for the sake if the human race's most advanced scientific mission, which they would have been training for all their lives.
But all of the above could get me damn near burned at the stake for heresay in this society. Nope, monotheist, patriarchal cultures have a *H_U_G_E* problem with sex, said problem being their sole unique characteristic, and thus believe that everybody else does, too. Well, censoring my TV, books, internet, video games, children's education, etc is bad enough. But the advancement of the whole human race is waiting on us to get our asses off the fence and EVOLVE already, and we're gonna blow it because we can't make up our minds what to do with our genitalia for 3 years? Time to head back to the cave and let the monkeys have a go: we're not fit to be the most advanced species.
...I would sprint for the cliff out of sheer reflex. I wasn't so sure about Blu-Ray before, but anybody Bill Gates doesn't like is a friend of mine!
As for the Redmond round table: I just realized that every time I hear Microsoft open it's mouth these days, it's complaining or unhappy about something. Is this what a mastodon sounds like as it sinks into a tar pit?
If we're actually going to hold back the most ambitious achievement of human history based on some Dark Ages puritanism, lets just sell the shuttle to France or some damn thing and forget about science, period. I mean, how are they planning to enforce this? Lock chastity belts on the astronauts before they launch? And did they get the idea that sex and space travel don't mix from seeing that episode where Spock flipped out during "pon farr"?
How did the nation that BUILT the space shuttle get THIS stupid THIS fast? I want my tax dollars back!
For the life of me I can't figure out why anybody would buy software with the "hood" welded shut.
As far as I can figure, because a/.er told them to.
I can just hear it now if/. added an automotive section: "Cars are too difficult to operate; who has time to figure out what all those yellow and white stripes on the road mean?", "The indicator lights on the dashboard need to be removed because Joe Sixpack doesn't know what they mean.", "The hoods should be welded shut and I'll happily pay a mechanic to check the oil - anything but teach my mom to do it!", "They should close down all the auto parts stores - who has time to use all those complicated tools and parts?", "The automotive industry is doomed because it won't unify everything into one brand, make, model, and color of car; who has time for deciding between all those choices?", "I would drive a Porche if they gave it away for free, but the employee parking lot at my job has all the spaces configured for Fords only.", and of course, the number one comment: "I'm sticking with my Model T because I already know how to use it - it's too much trouble to learn how to operate a new vehicle!"
When you get an email from a 419 scam, you could have a program set up to auto-respond to *just that sender* with generated garbage. You could have a Markov-chain algorithm that feeds in the scammer's email or a Dr. Eliza-type program - whatever, but the idea is to waste the scammer's time reading through emails that appear to be from interested parties, but are actually just bots that will bounce useless replies back forever! Wadda yah think?
I have a real problem with any life view that makes failing to solve problems a requisite outcome.
Words to live by! Such an unassuming line, so many applicable contexts. Dozens of faith-based philosophies and dogmas spring instantly to mind. Thank you, that's my favorite quote of the day.
Slashdot Mirror
(1) "Open Source" means "you can access the source code". Source code is nearly useless if all you can do is read it - you have to be able to compile it/interpret it. Do not strip out every single possible file having anything at all to do with source code. Slackware keeps the compilers and interpreters and libraries and header files and documentation needed for programming in about 15-20 different languages. You'd think that is a given - "Open Source" - "programming tools" - DUH! - but in fact, it's an exception. Damn near a freak.
(2) "Following the herd" is for lemmings. Slackware has kept it's text mode installer while the whole world has gone GUI-crazy. Listen, GUIs are a great idea when you're watching a movie or editing graphics or surfing the web - get it? That's what you need a GUI for. When all you need is to read and write text, a GUI is a useless, superfluous, wasteful, unnecessary overhead.
(3) "Popular" is for homecoming Queens. Slackware has gone halfway to divinity by ditching Gnome. Now I'd love it if it took the other step and ditched KDE, too. Check out the two-disk distro - know why you need two disks instead of one? KDE. The other window managers are any one better than Gnome and KDE combined, but if nobody ever tries them, no one else will ever know.
(4) Distributions are released on disks for a reason - to put the operating system ON THE DISKS! Not putting in a patch-work kernel that's just enough for it to wheeze it's way online and download the other 99.99% of itself. I don't know which I get more annoyed with with other distros - wasting the money to burn all those disks, or discovering I am expected to pay for another internet connection just because the system is helpless without the umbilical cord of the internet connected to it. You can take a computer, an electric generator, and your two Slackware disks to a desert island and end up with a complete system ready-to-go - and able to reproduce copies of itself if need be, thanks to those handy programming tools. I just can't figure out how Slackware does so much more on two disks than other distros do in five.
(5) Read docs - documentation good. Slackware has the full compliment of man pages, info system files, docbook, and various contents of /usr/share/doc, and in addition includes HOWTOs and FAQs from the Linux documentation project.
(6) Keep it simpler than simple. I've practically thrown up when I explore the directories of soem distros. Pointers to pointers to pointers to nothing, programs missing half the files they need to run, everything scattered to hell and gone. Then people wonder why their system can't detect it's hardware and freezes up. Slackware follows the traditional directory structure and abides by it, going by the rule that conventions form over time because they make sense, and are not to be disregarded in the pursuit of arrogantly asserting how bold and creative you are.
(7) There is no Slackware For Dummies. And well there should not be, because this distro is one that actually *compliments* your intelligence. And you'd be amazed how smart you are, when you're given the chance to be! So the package manager is minimal, and I hope it never changes. Packages are un-needed anyway, when the system can handle any source-code tarball you throw at it.
Thank you all for glancing through it. We now return you to your regular grandstanding about Photoshop, Ubuntu, and Star trek.
/me awards the Black Rose for best use of sarcasm in a post.
He meant to say, "prevent his students from reporting the inchurch predators to the online world."
http://wallpaperfree.blogspot.com/ I want MY cease and desist order, too!
Maybe somebody should scratch him.
Other desktops? I like Fluxbox and Window Maker and despise KDE and am even impatient with Gnome.
And numero-uno: Can I actually INSTALL something on it? Starting with JUST a TARBALL? Good compiler support, *complete* library/header files/developer packages, basic development/scripting tools (Perl, Python, Tcl/Tk, libc)? Is "compile", formerly a given in the Linux world, considered a bad word in a Suse forum? I hate being limited to what packages are available just for the distro or worse yet, being stuck with a whole system structured around a package manager that puts me through dependency-hell half the time (and treats me like a dunce the rest of the time). Which is why I run Slackware on my "home box". Also why I rarely touch Mandriva on the "kid's box". And why I've even tinkled around with Linux-From-Scratch. Hacker-friendly won't matter as much on the family machine, but when the Missus wants her Yahoo-chat-avatar-designer plugin that is available only as source code, I want to be able to get in, slap it in, and get out, not sit there for two days downloading an entire programming infrastructure for each little thing. It would be nice if my own custom programming solutions (simple Tkwish, Python apps, C++ SDL proggies, etc.) ran here, too.
And by the way, do you pronounce Suse like Dr. Seuss or like Suzy Creamcheese?
And of course, EVERYBODY wants infinite power while expending minimum effort. Yeah, I'd like not just graphic-editing software, but everything-editing software that can do everything I would ever hope to do and be just as intuitive as walking to use and require no learning at all. I'd also like a billion dollars, a Playboy-model threesome in my bed every night, and a lamp-bound genie to grant me infinite wishes whenever I summon him. For free. All I have to do is hold out my hand and it will fall out of the sky to me, right? Hey, c'mon! What are you laughing at? What's so unreasonable about my request?
I'm going to keep repeating it until it sinks into the consciousness out there: "Stealth Bombers are more difficult to operate than tricycles BECAUSE THEY CAN FLY."
Yet I stick with it, simply because I get traffic there that I don't get anywhere else. I go to *any* other blog site, which is actually staffed and the *code* *works* (Bloggerese bears no resemblance to HTML or any other known language, and is distinguishable in that it NEVER works the same way on two consecutive days.) and the site's always up. And I sit with my beautiful blog listening to the crickets chirp! I put it on Blogger and get 200 hits per day right at the start. The most popular piece of abandonware on the internet.
An awful thought - what if the traffic is ALL BOTS????
Good choice! Our family doesn't do fast food - period - but this was school we're talking about. So I caved. Have you noticed how much kids are targeted by advertising while in school? My kids bring home marketing junk from places like Home Depot and FedEx (T-shirts and such) that visit class. FedEx actually sent the daughter home with a temporary tattoo. I drew the line there - big business wants to graffitti their logo on my kid's bodies? I pitched it.
Who among us could not grok the same frustration? Funny anecdote: My kid went on a school field trip which included a stop at McDonald's. She returned with her happy-meal toy: a tiny little stuffed puppy-doll with a hu-u-ge tag sewn to it, just screaming with advertising and copyright information. The tag was about three times as big as the dog. I sent her for the scissors and snipped the tag off (in blatant disregard for the fine print saying I was committing a crime). Then the light bulb went off, and I asked her for all the *rest* of her stuffed animals. We had great fun performing tag-ectomies, as I explained to her that we had bought and paid for everything in the house, so it was ours to do with as we pleased, including stripping the commercial propaganda out of it. I think dolls are more fun to play with when they're allowed to just be dolls. She agreed. I'm just doing my best to raise a lawless little punk, here! (:
It's stuff like that that frustration with corporate capitalism can drive you to.
Guess everybody is too busy kissing the status-quo's ass to consider that things might change? What, something that's only been around for 30 years is all of a sudden hewwed in stone? Well, surprise, the technology you're married to now WILL crumble to dust eventually, as will your own dear bones, be it in a decade, a century, or a millenium. And other things WILL replace it. Be it by a new twist on an old scheme dreamed up out of some codger's half-gone imagination, or the fresh, new idea of young blood. Momento mori....
Nope. Just a coincidence.
Now, then: What is "our" best strategy? Do we want to see our software continue to improve and be freely available to everyone else as it was to us? Or do we want to give up, all of us give control of the world's computers to a few guys in suits to own forever, while we pay them for the priviledge of being enslaved? OK, not to prolong the straw-man's agony another minute - the public has already shown that it prefers to own and control it's own software, given the choice. It doesn't matter that the choice isn't unanimous - somebody else's decision to keep software free for all gives *you* the right to own and control a piece of it - whether you choose to depart from paid corporateware or not. If you don't pick Linux this year, it will be here next year to pick again. It can't go bankrupt because it doesn't live on money, so refusing to buy it cannot kill it.
That's the problem that MS is having. They're armed to fight lions and tigers and - dragons (oh no!) unaware that a bacteria is coursing through their veins, defeating them from the inside out. The truth is, Linux belongs to Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, too. So it belongs to everyone who works under them. It even belongs to real dickheads. But nobody can take it away from anybody else. How do you defeat air? or a cloud? or a dream? Linux is just that immaterial.
So it's silly to say what's in Linux's best interest. Linux doesn't have one. It is just an element. A corporation, on the other hand, is either making money and "alive" or not making any money and "dead". Since, unlike Linux, it *can* be killed, *it* has to worry what a best strategy is. In *their* best interest - is it better to spend the last fibre of your being trying to defeat something that can never go away? Or better to adjust to this new element and live peacefully with it - perhaps even support it?
I have a better idea. How about we shut all the Adobe-Macromedia zealots out of the whole conversation? The whole world does not revolve around Adobe-Macromedia and you A-M zealots absolutely never miss an opportunity to try to turn everything into a Gimp-vs-Adobe flamewar, even things that have nothing to do with it at all. I'm starting to think that Adobe is just as bad as Microsoft.
http://www.419eater.com/
So that's all it takes...
Where have you been for the 5,781,923,524 posts that actually *needed* a GIYF response?
Any of the Penn & Teller books, "How to play with your food", "How to play in traffic", "Cruel tricks for dear friends". I highly recommend the lighting pickle, the bloody heart-cake, the card trick w/ pizza delivery punchline, etc. You'll have more twisted ideas than you can implement in a single week. Try not to get arrested.
without losing a sense of reason Note that I nowhere cited reason. Only reflex, born of instinct. Reason is there to supply further judgement. Instinct is there to get my feet running in the mathematically most likely direction away-from-danger/towards-safety.
It's just that: every concern for sexual politics you can name happens to ordinary people right here on the ground all the time. People screw, unscrew, regroup, remove, and repent. See, you could send swinging couples up, so everybody can be comfortable with everybody else. Or make all the crew-members gay as some have suggested (though I don't know why; gays can break up and cheat and fight with the best of 'em). Or bring on people who don't have a high sex drive (even the most promiscuous of us can go 30 months without sex...such as after being widowed or divorced).
See, I've been places and seen things, and was for a while a frequenter of...if I described it, people would say "swinger's clubs", and that's not it at all, but we'll call them "swinger's clubs". You *learn* things about people, there. You learn to *relax* about sex! It happens. It happens to some people more than others, of course, and it happens in forms that attract and repell different kinds of people, given. You discover that you can be part of the orgy, or a spectator, and after a few turns at both, it doesn't make as much of a difference. Believe it or not, a group of people in a space capsule for 30 months are pretty much going to do what comes naturally, and you'd just better be ready to deal with it. Fix them, pack condoms, whatever it takes. It's also not the Soap Opera that people are trying to make it out to be: couples with rotten relationships stay together for years for the sake of the kids; I'm sure a couple can stick it out for the sake if the human race's most advanced scientific mission, which they would have been training for all their lives.
But all of the above could get me damn near burned at the stake for heresay in this society. Nope, monotheist, patriarchal cultures have a *H_U_G_E* problem with sex, said problem being their sole unique characteristic, and thus believe that everybody else does, too. Well, censoring my TV, books, internet, video games, children's education, etc is bad enough. But the advancement of the whole human race is waiting on us to get our asses off the fence and EVOLVE already, and we're gonna blow it because we can't make up our minds what to do with our genitalia for 3 years? Time to head back to the cave and let the monkeys have a go: we're not fit to be the most advanced species.
As for the Redmond round table: I just realized that every time I hear Microsoft open it's mouth these days, it's complaining or unhappy about something. Is this what a mastodon sounds like as it sinks into a tar pit?
How did the nation that BUILT the space shuttle get THIS stupid THIS fast? I want my tax dollars back!
As far as I can figure, because a /.er told them to.
I can just hear it now if /. added an automotive section: "Cars are too difficult to operate; who has time to figure out what all those yellow and white stripes on the road mean?", "The indicator lights on the dashboard need to be removed because Joe Sixpack doesn't know what they mean.", "The hoods should be welded shut and I'll happily pay a mechanic to check the oil - anything but teach my mom to do it!", "They should close down all the auto parts stores - who has time to use all those complicated tools and parts?", "The automotive industry is doomed because it won't unify everything into one brand, make, model, and color of car; who has time for deciding between all those choices?", "I would drive a Porche if they gave it away for free, but the employee parking lot at my job has all the spaces configured for Fords only.", and of course, the number one comment: "I'm sticking with my Model T because I already know how to use it - it's too much trouble to learn how to operate a new vehicle!"
When you get an email from a 419 scam, you could have a program set up to auto-respond to *just that sender* with generated garbage. You could have a Markov-chain algorithm that feeds in the scammer's email or a Dr. Eliza-type program - whatever, but the idea is to waste the scammer's time reading through emails that appear to be from interested parties, but are actually just bots that will bounce useless replies back forever! Wadda yah think?
Words to live by! Such an unassuming line, so many applicable contexts. Dozens of faith-based philosophies and dogmas spring instantly to mind. Thank you, that's my favorite quote of the day.